Alison Ballance is a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker, writer and radio producer. She joined Radio New Zealand\u2019s weekly science and environment programme\u00a0Our Changing World\u00a0in 2008, after 18 years producing and directing wildlife documentaries for Dunedin-based production company NHNZ. She produced films for international broadcasters on subjects as varied as kakapo and tigers in locations as diverse as Mongolia, Ecuador and Whenua Hou-Codfish Island. Before that she spent four months (in winter) on subantarctic Campbell Island studying feral sheep for her Master of Science degree.<\/p>\n
Alison combines her search for great location-based radio stories with her passion for islands, remote wilderness and natural history, and despite getting seasick this quest has taken her to the four furthest points of New Zealand\u2019s compass: Kermadec islands to the north, the Chathams to the east, Scott Base to the far south and West Cape in Fiordland to the west. She\u2019s now working to fill in the gaps in between! She loves meeting and interviewing passionate people, and sharing their knowledge and stories on-air, and what she really enjoys about radio as a medium is its intelligence and immediacy.<\/p>\n
As well as\u00a0Our Changing World, Alison produced the\u00a0award-winning<\/a>\u00a0Voice of the Iceberg\u00a0podcast series, and collaborated with\u00a0This Way Up\u00a0on the award-winning\u00a0The Science Of…\u00a0podcast series.<\/p>\n Alison has written 29 books.\u00a0Kakapo \u2013 Rescued from the Brink of Extinction\u00a0won the Royal Society of New Zealand\u2019s Science Book Prize in 2011.\u00a0Southern Alps \u2013 Nature and History of New Zealand\u2019s Mountain World\u00a0was a finalist in the 2008 Montana NZ Book Awards. Her essay \u2018Touchstones\u2019, a personal look at the issue of climate change, won the inaugural non-fiction Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Creative Science Writing Prize in 2007. Her latest book,\u00a0New Zealand’s great white sharks<\/a>\u00a0– how science is revealing their secrets, is a finalist in the non-fiction category at the 2018\u00a0NZ Book Awards<\/a>\u00a0for Children & Young Adults.<\/p>\n